Summer Design Retreat in the Land of Enchantment
In June 2024, TBG hosted the second annual Summer Design Retreat in Santa Fe, New Mexico—a geography offering a rich cultural palette to discover, including the area’s rich indigenous history, vibrant arts and culture, defining landscapes, unique architecture and more that made it a perfect location for this year’s retreat.
This retreat was conceived to be a sanctuary for creativity, offering our designers a rare opportunity to step away from the day-to-day demands of their profession and dive into pure, unbridled artistic exploration. The selected group—Yan Wang, Jake Burgus, Mikala Fitzgerald, and Hythus Hu—embarked on this journey to explore Santa Fe’s unique sense of place and enhance their creative perspectives. Careful consideration was given to various factors such as application responses, space limitations, and the firm’s goal to diversify experience levels among the group.
As first-time visitors to New Mexico, this year’s retreat attendees familiarized themselves with the local allure. Surrounded by red earth, they absorbed the vast landscapes and adobe buildings that define the region. They wandered through local shops, gathering art supplies, groceries for family-style meals, and local brews to enjoy each evening. With a full week ahead, the excursions promised to deviate from the more typical corporate retreat. TBG’s Director of Design, Nicole Warns, and co-founder, Tom Afflerbach, who are the Experts of Intention, planned it that way—designing the time away with purposeful programming and experiences while leaving white space for spontaneity, encouraging the group to shape the trip as their own. It was a time to venture into nature, think, reflect, engage in creative exploration, and discuss art—a different type of nourishment tailored for designers.
Breaking away from routine and the familiar Texas scenery, New Mexico presented a visual feast for our designers’ eyes. Each day, the team engaged in a series of creative exercises designed to activate the right side of the brain—the side associated with imagination, intuition, and spatial thinking. A deliberate departure from left-brained thinking, which emphasizes math, science, linear thinking, and logic. The team took notes, captured photos and videos, sketched, conducted art studies, threw pottery, tore paint swatches to create mosaics, and washed scenes onto paper with watercolors. They worked feverishly, etching the enchantment of the landscape into their memories, making art purely for the joy of creation. The group repeated these exercises each day, trying out new mediums, focusing on what elements create composition.
The retreat also emphasized the importance of connecting and communing with nature, not just as a source of inspiration but as a foundational element of design thinking. As the team explored the unique organic integration of Santa Fe’s architecture into its landscape, they saw firsthand how the city’s design seemed to submit to the natural environment, yielding space to be rewilded. This realization aligned perfectly with the retreat’s goal of exposing designers to new places and ideas that encourage out-of-the-box thinking. The blue of the sky layered with the red and orange of rocks, and the minty green of red willow, built the city’s tried and true color palette. These split-complementary colors—blue, green, and red-orange—mirror the harmony between the natural and built environments, reinforcing the notion that innovative design often comes from observing and respecting the natural world. If the team hadn’t felt it before, either on this trip or in their careers as landscape architects, they surely knew now—nature possesses a certain magic.
Sculptures, murals, and other local art form the heart of Santa Fe’s cultural identity. The team’s visits to significant cultural sites like the Santa Fe Botanical Garden and Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic Ghost Ranch were steeped in culture, offering landscapes lush with native plant palettes thriving without the need for maintenance or supplemental irrigation. These experiences broadened the team’s perspective, revealing a simpler way of life and a more natural approach to art. O’Keeffe had a particular fondness for Pedernal Peak, a prominent mesa near her home at Ghost Ranch. “It is my private mountain,” she once said. “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” This quote resonated with the team; although the scenic vistas couldn’t be “kept,” it offered our folks hope to persist with their art—reminding them that even if they don’t achieve exactly what they set out to do, the journey itself holds immense value.
As the week drew to a close, the group carried with them a renewed understanding of the connection between art, nature, and their own creative processes. This year’s retreat provided a space where attendees could step away from real world pressures and return to their studios with a fresh perspective and a renewed passion for their craft. Like O’Keeffe and her beloved Pedernal Peak, persistence in art is about more than the final product; it’s about the journey, the exploration, and the passion that drives us to keep creating.
